About PlugShare EV App

PlugShare is a free application that is compatible with Android, iOS, and web and allows users to find and review charging stations for electric vehicles. It provides users with the most accurate charging map across the world and displays stations from every major network in Europe and North America.

The Challenge

While PlugShare was already a well-known brand that had a database of more than 1,40,000 charging stations in the USA and Canada along with 2 million station reviews, Plugshare wanted us to provide more exposure and traffic mainly to USA based directories. This meant that we had to get links from sites based only in the USA or sites that enjoyed major traffic in the USA.

Thus, our biggest challenge was to find sites that got heavy traffic from the USA and mainly from city based blogs in the USA.

The Results

After merely working for 45 days, we created 60 active links with an average domain authority of 50.
Our efforts led to a 50% increase in organic traffic, along with an approximately 40% boost in overall traffic.

Our Link Building Plan

1. Resource Page Links

Plugshare had a very useful cache of EV stations, so resource page link building strategy seemed like a perfect move. We merely paid attention to finding highly relevant resources that specifically speak about EV charging station and outreach with personalised email.This resulted in white hat links from high-quality sites, like the one shown in the example below:

2. Blog Comment BackLinks

We usually don’t use blog commenting in our link building campaign but targeting city based blogs was crucial for PlugShare. Therefore, we used blog commenting to warm up the bloggers before doing outreach for broken link or resource page link building campaigns. This resulted in a high success rate and also fetched some high-quality links from the comment sections of different blogging sites, which made it look 100% natural and useful.

3. Broken Link Building

This strategy always works if applied properly. As we were already preparing our bloggers by commenting on blogs, it didn’t take us much effort in getting some broken links from high-quality sites from relevant pages.

4. Forum Backlinks

This is another underutilized link building strategy which can have a great impact if used correctly. We engaged with many EV car drivers and owners in EV forums or Tesla forums. The purpose behind this outreach was to update the EV car owners with the locations of EV charging stations near their localities that they were not aware of and it worked out quite well for us and PlugShare.

“Umesh was a real pleasure to work with and has fantastic link building skills. Due to the Covid pandemic, we are pulling back on marketing efforts. Once there is a more clear end to this virus, we will want to pick up our linkbuilding efforts again.”

Dan Wheeler

Digital Marketer - plugshare.com

Project Details